China's first moon rover, Yutu, or Jade Rabbit, and the lander are scheduled to take photos of each other Sunday night, a move that will mark the complete success of the country's Chang'e-3 lunar probe mission.

In the excellent tutorial of Yutu shown on CCTV, it looked like the high-gain antenna was locked to the mast cameras, so the rover may not have the capability of transmitting photos to Earth in realtime. Seems like they are filling for time now waiting for the pictures.

Say you want an image I have. Do you want me to just send you the jpeg *or* display that image on my monitor and then use my phone to take a picture of that image and send you that instead? Which one do you think preserves the original quality?

Why does it look like all the images they posted (apart from the landing sequence) are snapshots of a computer monitor or some other display instead of the actual data stream?

You hit the point...the images were displayed on the large screens of the control center and then the media like CCTV recorded and broadcasted them using another cameras. Maybe there is no interconnection between the flight control and broadcasting system.

They are missing an opportunity here, IMHO. I get the feeling these images could be blowing our socks off if released in the source quality instead of just this "cool, but only for what it represents" feeling.

They are missing an opportunity here, IMHO. I get the feeling these images could be blowing our socks off if released in the source quality instead of just this "cool, but only for what it represents" feeling.

Well, you know this is China....sometimes the photos show up in all kinds of weird places.

David Harland has just posted this from Apollo 11 which is rather appropriate.

“Among the headlines about Apollo this morning,” said CapCom Ron Evans during his wake-up call to the crew of Apollo 11 on the morning of Sunday, 20 July, “there is one asking that you watch for a lovely girl with a big rabbit. An ancient legend says a beautiful Chinese girl called Chang-o has been living there for 4,000 years. It seems she was banished to the Moon because she stole the pill of immortality from her husband. You might also look for her companion, a large Chinese rabbit, who is easy to spot since he is always standing on his hind feet in the shade of a cinnamon tree; the name of the rabbit is not reported.” The astronauts promised that they would “keep a close eye out for the bunny girl”.